Professional Training Scholarships

The purpose of the Professional Development Scholarship Program is to assist professional economic development staff and those directly involved with the economic development efforts of their communities with training costs associated with their economic and community development work. This program is intended to be a benefit of WEDA membership. These dollars can enable some our WEDA members with smaller budgets to be part of a WEDA training or other qualified trainings.

The $500 maximum will help any member in good-standing to attend the conference with little or no out of pocket expenses. It will cover registration costs, lodging, travel and meals. Please take advantage of these training dollars. It is available to qualified members following a 3-month wait period after joining. Scholarship funding is provided through a contract with the Wyoming Business Council.

Additional training funds may also be available through Business Training Grants at the Department of Workforce Services. If your training funded requested is available through them, we ask that you seek those primary funds first to enable our limited funds to serve more WEDA members annually. If business training grant funds are available to you, WEDA can become the secondary payee and a scholarship request can be made to WEDA for any uncovered eligible expenses that the business training grant does not cover.

General Rules

Each year WEDA will provide scholarships to assist qualified members with professional development training. These applications must be received by WEDA for review no less than 30 days prior to the beginning of the training.

• The Professional Development Scholarship Program is limited to available funding on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Scholarship funding may be applied to program tuition and/or travel expenses.
• Scholarships will be limited to one per person per organization, per year.
• Scholarship awards are designated to cover the greater of 100% of full program tuition expenses in an approved program OR a maximum of $500 of combined eligible expenses (tuition/registration/eligible travel costs).
• WEDA allows scholarships for 2 professional trainings per calendar year if our member is seeking fast-track professional certification with IEDC, EDI, or NDC at their current registration rates, for a maximum of $1500/year.

Who Can Qualify

• Participation in the Professional Development Scholarship Program is limited to qualifying members of WEDA. (Wyoming Business Council employees are not eligible.)
• The scholarships are provided to Wyoming WEDA members actively working in economic development as paid professional staff or, in smaller Wyoming communities without full-time paid economic development staff. They would be the designated person involved in their local community for its economic development activities.
• Priority will be placed on first-time paid economic development staff to develop their professional economic development skills.

What Qualifies

Expenses eligible for reimbursement through the Professional Development Scholarship Program are limited to tuition or registration fee, including training materials, and/or travel expenses. Tuition/registration expenses may be prepaid directly by WEDA to the educational organization, upon request, or reimbursed upon completion of the training via submission of the Final Report due within 45 days of course completion. Travel expenses will be paid in the form of a reimbursement only. Other expenses that are specific to a particular training program and not covered above require prior written authorization from the WEDA Scholarship Committee. Please review our brief and simple application form (PDF file) to learn more.

Eligible training programs include NDC, EDI, IEDC, downtown development programs and WEDA Conferences. Additional training programs may be eligible for consideration with adequate justification of the training's benefits to the community and state.